Good choice for a machine built for a particular purpose that doesn't need to run any new software.

https://www.cdw.com/product/windows-10-iot-enterprise-2021-l...

If I'm running Windows 11 Professional, I don't need the Windows Store to tell me I should check out Avowed Premium Edition in a meeting.

Or is somebody going to tell me it's my fault for leaving notifications on?

With the pace of modern hardware development, a lot of these computers are still perfectly serviceable.

People are unhappy at being told to buy new hardware when they have working hardware.

(Other things that have concerned people: Further attempts to force people to microsoft accounts, more invasive copilot promotion, recall, A/B tested ads in explorer, etc.)

I’m not claiming I’d throw out a Windows 10 PC. I’d personally install Linux on it instead. But I can certainly imagine someone seeing nothing worth salvaging from a 10 year old PC and tossing it, and I can’t say they’re objectively wrong for doing it. Should they personally ship it to another country at some cost in fuel?

I think people are downvoting at your feigned incredulity at something not bizarrely “wrong” to a lot of people.

> Edit: would the downvoters care to explain themselves with some arguments?

I'll bite. I know many many many people who had all the era's of PC you mentioned. None of them still have them. None of them sold them. They may have put them on the curb, or "recycled" them, or sent them to the landfill - I don't know and it doesn't impact the fact that I don't know anyone who has a single one of them still in use.

This is easy to confirm by doing some order of magnitude math on how many of these machines were made (many), and how many are still in use (very few).

Regarding the Windows 10 specific question: it is still supported and receives updates, so of course they aren't going to landfill yet. The question is what will happen in a year or so once they are no longer supported (most non-techy users wont be installing LTSC). Spoiler: the vast majority of them will be sent to landfill or "recycler", not sold and kept in use.

But anyway, technology is so dense where I leave that you can’t give away some stuff. A 10 year old PC? Maybe. 15-20 years? No way, unless someone needs a specific part from it. There is zero demand otherwise for such a thing. There’s so much new tech that slightly older is nearly valueless locally.

Win2K might break that, it and XP were back to back.

That said, Neptune was an unfinished Win2k home version. Getting it booted = buggy funtime.

I don’t game often and Windows ensured I didn’t want to by throwing roadblocks every time I booted the machine.

At least every Mac and Linux machine I’ve owned has happily booted into a working OS no matter how long it sat. Windows tried to upgrade my machine to Windows 11 without my consent, when it already knew my machine didn’t support it. That was fun.

My neighbor got permanently locked out of her laptop because Microsoft somehow attached her dead husband’s email account to her local account despite him having never logged in on that machine. I wasn’t able to figure out how to fix it.